TORONTO – The Progressive Conservatives would run balanced budgets once they eliminate the red ink in 2016, but deficits are OK if there’s an economic crisis, party leader Tim Hudak said Friday.

The federal Conservatives and the provinces — including Ontario — “did the right thing” when they started running deficits during the recession, he said.

“They had to spend during a significant downturn,” he said. “But they’re balancing their books.”

However, the Tories have pledged in their platform to pass a law aimed at stopping the government from spending more than it’s taking in.

The proposed Spending Within Our Means Act would “prevent the government from growing beyond a fixed percentage of the economy,” the document says.

The Tories also voted against the governing Liberals’ 2009 budget, which plunged Ontario into red ink.

Hudak now says it wasn’t wrong to run a deficit, but seven provinces have balanced their budgets and the federal government is anticipating a surplus next year.

“If there’s a major downturn like we had, that’s the proper reaction,” he said. “But then you start spending within your means after that. You don’t make it permanent.”

Hudak is promising to kill Ontario’s $12.5-billion deficit and post a modest $319-million surplus in 2016-17 — one year ahead of the Liberals.

To reach that goal, the Tory leader said he’d slash government program spending by six per cent over four years, including cutting 100,000 public sector jobs. Nurses, doctors and police would not be affected, he said.

The platform lays out a plan to axe 10 per cent of the civil service, eliminate “non-teaching positions” by 9,700, increase class sizes — which could affect the number of teachers on the public payroll — and reduce the number of early childhood educators in full-day kindergarten classes.

Some of the jobs will be cut by not filling positions vacated by retiring employees and cutting administrative jobs, the document says. Other jobs will be “transferred to Ontario companies” who take over services currently run by the government, such as gambling.

“Government’s payroll will also shrink as it eliminates agencies and programs that don’t offer good value for the taxpayer,” it says.

The measures will reduce the size of the public sector to 2009 levels, it says.

Will Hudak actually be voting for the Liberals since he has now endorsed two of their major policies?
First, Hudak had acknowledged that approximately 550,000 of his so-called million jobs will be created simply by following the decade old policies of the Liberals. Now he is saying that it was okay to run a deficit during a major economic downturn. Who would argue that the downturn of 2009-10 was not a major one?
As regards to the Federal Tories balancing their books, Hudak should have been smart enough not to have gone there. It simply reminded Ontarians of Flaherty’s claim that he had balanced Ontario’s budget. However, an independent audit after Ontarians had ousted the Provincial Cons (Hudak was a junior minister in that government) had found that Flaherty had actually left Ontario in a $6B hole.